GLIMPSE

A Written Creative Work subnrtted to the faculty of San Francisco State University 7-X) I £ In partial fulfillment of the requirements for tlie Degree

Master of Fine Arts

In

Creative Writing: Poetry

by

Erika Bojnowski

San Francisco, California

Fall 2013 Copyright by Erika Bojnowsk- 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read GLIMPSE by Erika Bojnowski, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing: Poetry at San

Francisco State University.

Andrew Joron Assistant Professor of Creative Writing

Maxine Chemoff Professor of Creative Writing GLIMPSE

Erika Bojnowski San Francisco, California 2018

Glimpse is a poetry collection that investigates where dreams, memory, and reality intersects with consciousness through experiments in imagery and form. Specifically, how these constructed realms create complex narratives that shape identity. Glimpse uses a paired format to study the imaginary realms that act as places of refuge and personal reflection. This is juxtaposed with the daily realities of growing up, inner turmoil, familial hardship, adolescence, love, loss, belonging, and the mundane. It is at once a coming of age story, a collection of moments, and a surrealist landscape. This collection examines how poetiy can inhabit the space between these realms and form connections through glimpses of reality within the imaginary, and the imaginary within reality. Glimpse also explores the role of place and how it can become uncanny, magical, or phantasmagorical within the context of memory, and how this landscape shapes us as humans. How, within this titular landscape the most ordinary is often the most peculiar. I am interested in where these different modes of existence converge poetically into a sense of being both in the world and within the mind, as individual narratives that we construct for ourselves. These poems investigate how identity inhabits the spaces between dream and reality through a network of imagery and language with the intent of discovering how poetry can move between realms and across conciousnesses in ways that other mediums cannot.

I certify that the Annotation is a correct representation of the content of this Written Creative Work.

Date PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank my thesis reader and teacher Andrew Joron, for his invaluable knowledge, insight, kindness, and support. I would also like to thank Maxine Chemoff for helping me realize this project in its beginnings, and for her guidance throughout my time at SFSU. I thank Truong Tran for giving me the space to discover my poetics and for being a constant voice of encouragement. Thank you to all my professors and classmates in the Creative Writing Department for their dedication to each other and their students, and for pushing me into new and exploratory realms of writing.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part 1: sea...... 1 filament...... 2 years ago, immediately, tomorrow...... 3 clutter...... 4 avenue...... 5 quilt------— ...... 6 gravity...... 7 pixel...... 8 ours...... 9 otherworld...... 10

neighborhood...... 12 greenwood...... 13 lens flare...... 14

millisecond...... 16 instant histories 17 1994...... 18

294 ...... 19 flora and fauna...... 20

Part 2: fog 21 knife edge 2 2

A-...... 23 walking home...... 26 composure...... 27

page 103...... 29 cnidarian...... 30 thank you for the whiskey,...... 31 speaking through dew„.„..... 32 ophthalmic ...... 33 habitual...... 34 shoelace...... 35 quietus...... *...... 36

vii goose bumps...... 37 meanwhile...... 38 glued...... 39 encyclopedic...... 40 stories from the bottom of the ocean. ~...... 41 two-dimensional...... 42 dissipate...... 43 black wing. 44 for in n...... n...... i...... ^15 diffuse...... 46 quicksilver...... 47 abridged...... 48 there will be time ...... ______49

Part 3: ether...... 50 rabbit hole...... - ...... 51 think, trip, trudge...... 52 dystopian symmetry ...... 53 dark matter------54 zoology______underworld...... 56 forgetting...... 57

7 5 SR forecast...... 59 universe, encased...... divulgence...... 61 blood orange...... (O

...... 63

...... 64

...... 65 tidal ...... ,___ ...... ___ -T-,t...... -Tr...... ______66 edges...... 67 don’t ask why ask how ask what ask where...... 68 heir...... ,...... 69 an uncertain domain...... 70

I’ll let you Know when I get there...... 71 another dream...... 72 1

PARTI

sea

foamy tendrils like caul fat; bravely sweep into tfie obligatory sleep— where gulls shrink into a mass o f gray rumbling. filament

Let it all fade in: glass shard glitter, far-flung nebulae— nerves twisting themselves into a phone cord. dark blooms, a croaking branch lamenting silence— a dove call breaks it in half.

The mind is one million sardines held down by a fishing net.

crescendo, crimson. stone-kick, fist-clench. the tremor of a morning voice.

the dead leave peonies on your doorstep in a dream, and you awake to something that seems to breathe forever. years ago, immediately, tomorrow.

They say the moments will replay themselves— an off-center pendulum, an oscillating gag reel that sound can be preserved in clay— melodious air pockets, antediluvian chirrups. chords stretched into a purgatory, of sorts.

did you feel an air leave you? did your dreary vowels spill into a watch glass?

a precarious mood hangs above— vou look up hippocampus in the dictionaiy. 4

clutter

The sweaterskin of night’s edge is where I go when the} addle me. the glaze the glare: the ghastly wither that creeps up the window. fly through the gauzy grey with moth-hole stars—

the moon embossed in a permanent halo.

grip a daggei and skulk through arching wavelength—

the floorboards are loose and the fourth stair creaks.

the air of the hour entropic— asks, what the dream says about its ownei as a mosquito hawk stalks the wall. 5

avenue

Varnished wood reflects my image back to my squint: sprawled, expansive.

these moments live inside the ribcage.

I found a snake’s husk in the truck bed— grey and starched, it crumbled when I held it.

grey day, bee sting.

tortoise-cumulonimbus. vines.

an injured crow in the field:

dew-eyed, phosphorus. screeching— a piano’s rightmost key.

the vastness of things, azure and real— weeps inside of eggshells.

a feeling that rose inside me like dire hawks. 6

quilt

Exhaled by the herringbone landscape: as dragon breaths, a low spirit that brushes your Dare ankles. thatched, a pillowy mist that rushes through your hair—

a brittle shiver. if you could pass your hand through it would be like touching a ghost

an ancestral condensation amassed from those who have touched it before: the grasp of molecules— tugging.

a taste of pewter or waxy pith:

echoes of once inert voices traveling through the complexities of your eai

it lives in moss filled corridors, between the hazy glories of early wood:

it hangs like wet fur, or a quilt that drapes itself over a gorge gravity

quick breath— a blue ghost, it comes to the flesh heavy: a glowering octave. a fizzy sensation usurps a birdcall: a carbonation, a release of blonde sparks. the stars are waxy apples glinting on a shelf. we are separate as gravity separates those things we don’t know how they are attached. our outlines are refuge for pavement, the serrated edge of finite light— Peter-Pan-shadow; lightening barely missing the sails of your ship.

gravity: a lonesome and measureless swamp, a crow-call winked into quiet—

blinked. vertiginous.

glinting eye I feel/ I vague /I must sift.

blink/ dumb in the conquest of eyes and teeth— my vertices don’t touch.

fracturous.

each dog-eared shadow sits in the depths of me. 8

pixel

A clock sees you as heat signatures, delineated red swarm— ether. your are dispersed by a plastic fan into space.

a fox is spellbinding, like these scraped sentences:

they yield carbon dust - a shiver of black on the side of your hand.

an airplane marbles the atmosphere— falter, our fathers on stilts:

be good, be good. their neckties are treacherous rivers in moth-eaten Atlases.

the eye, an unimaginable vortex, writes the last lines of an epitaph with concussive tracking—

the earth, a gargantuan blue beehive:

do you ever listen. 9

ours

Sent outdoors: pedaling fast, blooming wire— wind cradles the dizzy chimneys and the leaves achoo

/let shadows bleed into alleys where frog calls kick at night’s cu rta in -

homing lights blink on. the moon is set into an owl’s eye socket. renegade twilight. 10

otherworld

I stretched into shadow: xylophone bones and little treacheries. the silent mercy of a faucet-drip— the red plastic coffee maker, the sliding doors, the breakers. cells and pinpoint minutes assemble into a pair of shoulders— a nest of hair.

and quickly, treading through forested notions—

the scuffed moon sneered at the sea: a giant plate forever asleep, sailing through the ages.

I’d let it claim me. 11

scavenger;

In violet-lit kitchens we scavenge for popsicles: neural messes and maps tangle with chlorine-green hair, swells of self clicking on.

12:00 blinking on a VCR, forever. slipstream sleep where the dead are constant chameleons— sheets hanging off the balcony, blowing in gray wind' ghostly skins.

In these kitchens, something is always on the verge of something I someone is scolding / someone is running through barefoot dripping pool-water.

time fossilizes sap: spectral ambei / insects trapped in permanent pirouette / a procession of blurry portraits from a shopping mall. swell of voices: hear them as they are / each life lived pressing on the larynx: a scratched record / a whirlpooi / a stick dragging through sand, these low-violet kitchens— their slipping sun spears wink off cartoon juice-glasses with dish soap striations:

push/ pull you into time. neighborhood

you whisper to rooftops as gutters drop rain onto your shoes you find no one except for a dead sparrow, fat with blood. each silver shadow swallows the hills— painted with a gold edge, soft, like caterpillar hair.

a house coyly winks with scratched windows, a girl on a Ferris wheel— her knees blowing easily in warm wind.

animals open their throats for the quelling of dew, the flux of dawn,

leaves twitch out symphonies.

you sink under every stutter and curtain-crinkle—

every sigh, a rupture in the fault 13

greenwood

That light you felt: chameleon and diaphanous, fills the tracks of greenwood beasts, who cut lace from darkness. did you find in the sunny sediment,

that thorny feeling—

of walking through blanketed dusk, enraptured by hearty swooning?

That light you felt: lionhearted and sonorous,

a bitten quiet, sewn from com silk—

rustling beneath your early, shaded gaze. 14

lens flare

I love in sleep, where the sun makes halos, a charade of light— glycerin rainbow:

something falters in the moments between awake / asleep—

a mosquito brushing against an arm/ a firefly fossilized inside a bedpost.

a totemic fissure: this sleep paralysis.

a crisp parenthesis / a roll of film never developed.

limpid, mistook for a sprite. 15

damage

Watercolor-blui

phamom-corridor

echo-incessant sea-shame:

loosely tangled, every thread of head-thread.

spires threaten with grinning glint— always, always spiraling.

morose light,

grey petering though doors:

revolving, revolving. millisecond

Nothing is etemai. no artifice of light years. 110 halogen particulates. maybe it’s the density of being that swells— mto land’s cuticles, primordial dramedies streaked with softbox-light. no quotidian ghosts. no bird-song phantasmagoria. history has spoken. Ike bloody molasses— ’.ike a silver tuning fork. haplogroups lick sugar from fog: pluck their nerves— fiy their food in sun pools.

nothing is as etemai as the full-frame consciousness of sleep—

the lungs breathing themselves, a pair of phantom bellows.

things persist.

the architecture between brain lobes, a blurred chaos striving for buzzing.

a starched collar, a heavenly barcode, a millisecond of soundlessness:

eternity sleepwalks through scarlet room' dreaming of fields coated in idyllic empty. 17

instant histories

Remember to forget these fictions that hatch from their palms. night glides over, a giant manta ray—

we only imagine poltergeists

we raise our children in atriums— kick the craters oft' the moon, catapult every star onto the dinner plates.

in the sullen sweetness of rippling air, clutching closed a sweater— it all reverts to mathematics,

beaten by the unstoppable: the instant. 18

1994

The moon is your pensive lantern, bled white refraction— a glowworm.

a haunting eye. a flashlight under the blanket— winking with loose batteries:

Morse code tor rain-runoff. midnight moth-flutter.

the stuffed lion whispers beneath pillows—

you are here you are whole, you are you or some other you—

it doesn’t matter.

crickets will sing you their promise of conscience, they wear colorful bow ties;

their tiny shoes clack on the sill— friendly, out of tune violins. 19

294

You glide over a whisper of weeds— bees swim in the void loitering in secluded canyons

there was a plastic horse affixed to a spring, the way it squeaked was like stepping on a mouse.

a loose hem of fog catches in the tree sway, and you notice that vour mother smiles with only one side of her mouth— her eyes filled with Dlacated ghosts. 20

flora and faunz

I name the stuffed owl after an unreciprocated friendship, try at the bubblegum encased in a spherical jail.

the brevity of clapping erasers: a chalk dust tornado can be seen from the windows of the International Space Station a quadrangle of rooftop origami a creeping nostalgia of woodsorrel:

I hate the taste but chew the stems anyway— tiny yellow flowers marking some version of bucolic femininity I can t grasp. playground ingenue. odometers and marine mammal figurines hide among shards of rock— endangered species books wallpaper my heart, neurotic daisy chains hang from the rafters.

mountain lions are drawn from how-to’s— scribbled crudely in fat pencil, they yawn as they are shoved into filing cabinets.

remind myself of the magnetized ohms that erupts from pampas grass- a memoir in fractaled plant cells.

I unstick a muddy boot and paint with jaundiced light.

unfurling dead wings reveal how swiftly they cut time in the air; how their sidereal mechanisms are reduced to framed crucifixions.

old gods breathe vaporous, into spectral tree networks, underground they speak, mycelium transmissions: the conifers whisper a list of names. 21

PART 2

fog

a winged and fleeting thing, latent photograph—

a glistening thread, a slurry— when you close your eyes,

do you feel the blue static of time? 22

knife-edge

Along the hem of incandescent, where the dogs of lantern light howl through the fissures— toothy and lonesome, tollow— for I am cloaked with the rising fractals erupting from your voice-crack. what kind of wizardry has compelled us to stagger into the wide green, through coaxing Sirens and bellowing bellows?

follow, and cut into time with the knife-edgi

with the brave dark that rests upon more dark and more dark:

hallowed dark— accurate,innacurate. moment 1.

I call to scorched tree litter— a name of light. a name of squirrelled-away pebbles and golden beer cans.

a plastic scuba diver:

standing incongruous at the bend in the creek.

what do I call myself? a cursive consonant, a house of burned matches? the sun wrinkles blankets— wrinkles this place where I smoke down to the nub and speak-soft to my animal brethren in the same puff. moment 2.

What do you call the claw of time? this feathered jargon, this kaleidoscopic clutter?

be still in this swallowed dark. nocturnal beings show themselves in electric blinking:

a tangle of stringed lights— tacked up, year-round.

the power is out. we push tiles of words around.

sometimes we make do with cupboard scraps 'ike ants or like mice. moment 3.

I chase these mossy quests as far as the water snakes. as far as the wind— sung pneumatic, scatters helicopter seeds drifting through sepia.

there are thousands, slowly swirling through tree-breath.

you say this is the most beautiful thing— I believe you. walking home

Wading through spumed thought, exhaling cold moonlight— an amber flicker in country windows.

a television blares in a vibrant crash of cymbals. I am quick, riding across a prodigal stretch of clouds— aghast, in boulevards of shadow.

I trudge through slumped lawns amidst the taste of cricket chirps, bashful on my tongue—

avoid the panicked shuffle of low-lying brush a worried varmint. composure

I must delve into unspeakable, pull the string of misty streetlamp. an owl perched there, calling into obsidian put myself together with metal fasteners and silt, tear-lit jewels: a stolid photograph of star-smear. exhale.

emanate.

there is no icepick-trajectory..

clouds aie combed across rooftops by errant air, as I dwell in the marshes of dreams and splinters catching in skins of selves:

follow zigzag. follow the wrinkles of earth. like scrunched wax paper—

into the heart, •nto the heanh.

where fiery tigers wince at daylight. 28

at 3:00

can I triangulate this signal? this halfhearted voice from adolescent isosceles? it is heavy cymbals: locked-in, lockjaw cellar— sitcom lighting and uncomfortable conversations with your mother.

she is snapping her gum and defacing textbooks, she wants to kind-of-sort-of-not-really her way into an ease of strawberry-scented-eveiything— smooth legs jutting out from her skirt, two elegantly bent chopsticks. 29

page 103

I have heard tales of a phantom ship— its sails are gills breathing grey fog. there are rats on board with knotted tails cannibalizing themselves when the last crumb of hardtack rolls into the sea. these moments disappear behind curtained, bored eyelids— the sun, a giant welt..

in history textbooks they evaporate: stale beer in a iunray.

you touch a chewed Diece of gum under the desk.

someone drew devil homs and wrote: PEGGY WAS HERE on Blackbeard’s head.

there are/ are there still traces left?

tintype photographs eroded silver smudge— the way metal turns rainbow in fire: its elements charred in smoky coat tails toward the sky.

what did the fishermen catch in their nets that day; how many bore the curse? 30

cnidarian

Fissures. popcomed, cracked light, shadow-throwing silence into the Mariana Trench. an upside-down thank you bag— pale in comparison, loose approximation of your severed cloud.

Jell-O anthropomorphized. enduring star-sparks for hundreds of years. zombie-buoys— alivedead floating on highways of heathen glass.

Neptune’s wrath never touches the soulless, never strikes lighting into heartless blobs.

we are mapless.

no guiding Polaris, no God to blow through us a paradoxical bagpipe, only wind, everpresent. rusted time.

the impossible azure churning our body of rags.

we don’t protest in our elegiac wandering. we don’t die we don’t breathe above cities of coraf we are planktonian stoicism,

a clip of sundust asunder. feathery hail of fish scales: stung by electric hair. 31

thank you for the whiskey,

now I tie your shadow into knots to hide inside a safety deposit box, so that when we are gone— someone might know. a gilded hinge on the back of your skull: let in light, let in dark.

1 want to imagine your dark circles as blankets, your sturdiness as a tree— droll, sharp-eyed. lethargic verse roiling around— an angry sea of mouthwash,

astringent and minty, our futures scuffed up.

and for all that wandering, all these dusky breaths, what was left?

what moments drawl and serenade a parking lot of glass fractures?

alight- a starry field,

a brave moon drawing its nightly Rorschach portrait. 32

speaking through dew

frostfem. sweptup. Lucite rain.

pillow indents — cotton tributaries marking tenterhook dreams.

I am not sure how sure is sure, the brief-clear/twenty-twenty— albumen globule, moments after the eye drops are squeezed in. magnifying. magnetic.

tadpoles belly-laugh, gossip in standing water— wear algae-gowns.

it becomes ephemeral when written in another language. what language do we speak in Limbo?

yolky-yellow daydream film— chevron stripes culminating in the margins of the lives of Grandparents, now, it is cartoon hippopotamus teeth.

now, it is the loops of language. it is my leaf-crunch voice that once spoke through dew drops—

now, it is just drawing spirals on paper. 33

ophthalmic

Clarity aches in the sternum in similar cadence to your voice— breathed and braided sky into its iron-timbre.

the eyes are doll-like and sleepy— with two red canyons brazen beneath them habitual

There are brief periods of blankness— but it’s the force of the sea that keeps me here. the waves are an old mirror, fleeting and sorrowful— my hands, two naked abalone, drawing birds with calls that sound like tambourines.

sometimes I forget my place and grow into your matrices, swatting the moon away with my hand—

vacuous: the inside of a chocolate rabbit. 35

shoelace

i can remember a drawer in your house where I swear; your live heart lay beating. next to a thumbtack and a broken bit of shoelace— antiquated breadcrumbs scattered among shiny forks.

I caught it wanting, fighting the angry dusk: the stampeae of a thousand dreams.

I do not exist— there is only my copy and the placid watcher: as evidenced by a single hair I left behind at the post office or a brief reflection in a hubcap.

I follow the braid of telephone wires, write myself onto the phantoms that phase the doorways of your mind.

in the blurry edge of unlensed vision— you grabbed my rough hand, inspected it while whispering. a cloud passes by its reflection in a high window, a pistol-shot atmosphere lingers.

something leaps from your chest and sprawls on the ground: a roadkill skeleton. quietus

Sailing along the fringed edge of night’s coat, running until there is silence. a feeling that you were sketched— that vou are nothing but freehand-charcoal spasms,

of grinning tunnels along miniature highways, edgeless in the curious draping of light.

it hides at the bottom of the sea’s brimming inkwell, beneath sofas in circumspect living rooms— in a television’s embers in the dew-glow—

we know there is never anywhere to rest this skin goose bumps

There was a stripe of blood that encircled the sun— lit up the cracked ground scaled, a diamondback— whispering to tangled grasses with its bookmark tongue.

I thought that someone might breathe life into you yet. leave behind a voice that murmurs steadfast through your dreams. in the temple of yams, I cannot save you from the labyrinth of goose bumps and sharp twigs. 38

meanwhile

What clocks traipse on in heirloom housings; dispatching signals from obscured dimensions? life writes nothing. a train screaming through a dream

/ the cut of a raven call.

India ink shadows sleepwalk through insect-eye headlights; they peer through cobwebbed sheen- the dull emblem of night watching you sleep the pillows growing heavier with time and salt.

[it’s probably pretty boring].

tinnitus purrs in the cavern of an ear— marionette eyelids allow the still morning to cut through the moonless dream

/ a heroic saw. are you or aren’t you or is this just the dream of you?

Ithat would be a strange joke] 39

glued

The night is in your pockets speaking with the bravery of a cowlick: all spark and light— furrowed along the fence and clipped with clothespins.

I trap smoke inside a glass box and glue this wrinkled sentence to your jacket.

I want everything to stop. 40

encyclopedic

Etched out ribbons of sinew wrap around the nervous diction of grasses— there is no frayed edge, no sun-bleached thought only reptilian teeth and eschewed murk.

in bled-out ravines, the blemishes of ghosts and barges materialize—

from rail-thin ache, from antediluvian cliffs, smoked out far out—

here they stay, here they follow. 41

stories from the bottom of the ocean

A sunken ship rests at the bottom of a warped orb balanced on stray turquoise axis— ogled. binocular.

an ancient breastplate, a fossilized freckle.

what worlds are green, what worlds are geysered?

the spill. the glands and bottle-shatter reflexes.

a creaking ache paints distant, circling birds—

swirling breath.

you speak of epistolary voyages. you pull glowing CGI threads from your skull. 42

two-dimensional

The watch hands are sighing, you stand in a penumbra, an icon in a church: your halo— a comical circle behind your head. catch a curl and light it. you run down streets, glowing and boundless. thunder: the distant clank of armor, the blind rage of a god—

[otherwise] the smell of laundry powder wafting across town.

do you wish I could spend every bronze minute; or that I might fade into the dead-languago of sleep? maybe if I had said said all of something, said every light beam, said every star-map—

I would have noticed that you don’t sleep anymore, that you were leaning into that vanishing world.

things here are differently-lit, chasing the light with my book. 43

dissipate

In the shadow of your curtained lodgings I waver across a messy floor— spit ankles of inklings into the rift. you bite the tongues of philosophers, as air weeps onto blades c f grass.

your gestures drag the light, stars are somehow louder, screamed in bright blue

morphed. an orchestra of flashlights glints off vodka bottles and the lost teeth of shellfish.

coyotes lap at the moon as though it were a great, sticky pear— I see you with half-closed eyes and dissipate into gauzy air. black wing

A careful smear of light swells inside a fissure of stars, the inky backdrop, a crosshatched bruise pours in through the leaking sill. rustled clouds parted by porch lights show their husks while rodents weep in craggy brambles.

a foghorn stamps out its brooding aria, and I think that it might sing you these mysteries— these whims, hexed, in a gloomy wash of voices to which I cling like a shriek

I will be relentless, peer into daydreamt dusk.

neon signage boasts of drunken hearsay, staunch and wild souls run aglow beneath the window.

in overcast taverns I find these muses: still caked in plaster, their hair a mess of brown cotton and weeds, winsome, rolling in the amber grain of fatigued televisions.

speak into the dark, cracked and marbled— eye-flutter, a crazed moth / pulsars, the light did not die— it only found another mountain to nestle behind.

and you. you, nestled between hours, when the moon is swollen, and the sky is black with wings—

peer into sparking entities, begging to know how many stars still bum alive. 45

for them

I have drawn breath from stone and boxed lightening with indignant fists. shouted into envelopes— beguiled by the sorcery of the tongue, pulled foxtails from their backs

through the tendrils of hours, I surround the bent shadows of candle flickers—

wait in moonless woods with stiff feathers.

T have bled lampposts of their nectar and misty static:

a frayed rope— my timeline,

quietly slithers from a crosshatched knowing. diffuse

Crystalline rays drape the clairvoyance of trees:

their rings hold lullabies of hurricane,

the cold of stone invents dreams— hidden, as stars.

owls. clotted aerial sounds: in their calls 1 find excuse to linger, to exist in the pink light of nudged-open curtain—

what must crack me open quicksilver

Carried on a beam of light, photon arms and sundown shadows: you are easily lost in the tundra of lined paper and swarming. cloaked in the redwood of memory, in a sock cap— still calculating parenthetical dawndust,

you wade through the embers of time, a kind of phoenix.

[I think we are just renters in this life and we don't know who tne landlord is].

spoke through a sheet of moonlight— a foreshadowed reverie in silver and gravel.

it’s quicksilver sliding from my hand. 48

abridged

I can only think of the refrigerator: haphazard notions of kitchen scraps, standing with a garbage bag in my hand, a black, industrial cape—

I find echoes inside knife-scraped jam jar. chandelier fangs bite around your absence: the piquant smell of ballpoint pens and mildew— far-away stories in the genius pewter of eyes. the grit of your laugh transfused with anthropoid wood swirls.

I erode with this shrinking landmass, pummel shadows with two cartoon eyes glowing in streaked-black— the dust on my pillow stirs up phantoms and marauders.

I don’t want to know who will live here now. you grip a grease pencil with red knuckles: the drafts of underground in which you misspent your auroral mind.

I try to remember the last careful step you took along the abridged volume of existence. 49

there will be time

In endless bouts a feathery silence suspends pinwheels.

smooth, like sliding your hand inside a bag of grain.

fused to rocky ardor, a mollusk—

a grueling. walk faster. oxidize— tear.

a seizure in bottle-green:

a crisp air. a canary colored spite— a molten voice in flooded hearsay.

in your honeycomb jailhouse, you toy with the feeling-world. 50

PART 3

ether

blue-dripped boughs— dogged and thin as a handkerchiefs,

set crisply against the vinyl night, your hands, trying to think—

birds, breathing their aria to the somber hole-punches of time. 51

rabbit hole

Here, now— saffron thread vein, all of my murmurs and encroaching shadows: wet chalk streaks white tears or bourgeois graffiti— you are so far from the sea now. pass through the curtain of inky velvet, a pewter thought perched— ticking riddle, mahogany door. hapless mirror world, inverted cavern.

it’s cyclical, this algebraic denial—

lost among medical dictionaries that smell of rabbit fur and grease pencils; oages like onion skin.

infantile. mouth stuck.

[all of these fumblings blur and burst].

the eyes are a pair of shocked fireflies: whisper-sharp— draw from the quiver. 52

think, trip, trudge.

I stare down the sorrowful hallway of a dream in which I beat the powder off a cloud. you sang to glass and paper— the ring on your tongue like chimes underwater.

swallowing all the tinny morning sounds. you are quiet galloping toward infinity— a wisp of fog.

1 step onto columns of air, and soar into gloomy cellars: a friend to limbless furniture and tin can telephones— the life of an ember surpasses in an instant. arise to the sound the needle lifting from the phonograph:

in my chain link home— a residual ghost 53

dystopian symmetry

A dreary orchestra: dragonesque steam rises from porthole— albino pigeons roost nestled between vampiric nails.

what zoologist would venture here?

dandelion spores stick in my hair. an oblique zoetrope through the bus window: florescent material, moonwalking dusty philosophies, a head-high—

ripped off beetle wings and sun-bleached soda cans. 54

dark matter

Nothing is a shroud, thickly surrounding words like rubbery-gum.

it lives in the last-light of eye-fl utter— book-bound, creeping through synaptic incandescence. it is where the sun, a ring of lipstick left behind on a cup— is loosely dangled in a blank sky.

it breathes between these small histories, where quiet creatures live in oblivion— their teeth and claws someday become dirt.

it is the little glitches that spark gently inside your ear— a nocturne in deep crimson.

you bravely draw yourself into and out of it. zoology

If you try hard enough you can feel blood pulsing inside your lip— hurried vessels: a swarm of ants. stippled air settles into skin

requiem in muted purple. the moon is a smear of paint or a misprinted orb.

stalagmites are played by the wind, early-Doppler rain slick— the shrouded whisper of bird feet. an infinite chime rings out in the dark [impromptu xylophone], seize the latent edge of sound, the hazy curtain of child-sleep the nervous light of drunken wicks: in the lowliest shade, raw diamond— these are your artifacts. underworld

I am attempting to pluck electric each gray, sharkskin cloud— to find a labyrinth of glass where the weight of your heart is compared to an ostrich feather— a sacredness that only happens where morning’s foggy threads tangle, indefinitely.

kind, a.e these spirits that drip from gutters, a precipice: brooded for a thousand years and cut / glinting talon— the sound of Pleiades, your somber canticle. a volcanic sneeze o f cinders blacks out a movie screen with thousands o f dusty capes. 57

forgetting

endless swell— drift in syrup. a creaky metal star answers: air. spun like candy floss. answers in the pulse of the earth.

be with this breath, be in this or out of this— they don’t care which.

there was a nail on the floor but I never stepped on it. 58

7.5

A flash of emerald in this shadow-shiver: exude blur, jellyfish-vision. you told me how you went blind once, [albeit, briefly]. a dark gravity holds down your shoulders: two strong marbled fists

/ don’t let it get to you, no one can get to you.

dust piles in the eaves— a light of nearing,

/ humming refrigerator and paper bag crinkle. breathe out, veii of mist.

hollow emblem, match-strike. a pair of eyes walking toward you.

tangled in receipt papers, your smirk faded—

I a closing anemone. 59

forecast

It’s the thistle-beaten echoes who write the bronze words and teetering stars that I wear on each shoulder, a hum becomes the soundtrack.

chattering weeds, in textured waiting. it’s the nervous energy of an old woman knitting a scarf that could wrap around the earth several times. universe, encased.

brick-cold, the golden window rushes into unspectacled blur:

a musty air of pinecone dust and

salt-toothed wind. vicious water echo, stilt-walk

silver steam rises around the loose mumble of a dragon or the same every day grey, every day.

in silken corridors, where bated light spills and shadows peer from ominous: perilous, paramount— a mountain of diaphanous light. what word would be your mountain? what singe of refraction coats every edge? a spired metaphor, a sleep splinter. 61

divulgence

oceaned-away to sky slivers, to the silvery threads of a shutter’s headache: when you speak, does it comes out as bubbles that glide across puddles— rippled portals, laugh-wincing?

the ruddy window winks water bluish, these friendly cinematic occurrences—

talking about how listening to something recorded on wax cylinder is strangely religious. 62

blood orange

Imagine turning off, kettle-pitch extinguished— Alka-Seltzer dissipating in cloudy striations. molecules abide, stop their fervent fission.

Yes, love. chain-spoke: pontificate, spine-snap: coat buttons. bravery lives inside a voice— a brooding pier in cotton wool fog. would you lie with me, in the eccentric light of chalky wings?

I of the cobweb, I, a tower—

a tearful sparrow, a hackneyed sail.

a spangled twinge changes my voice into running hooves— it would behoove you to paint blood orange, your inquiries into ominous. 63

catch

The lamps levitate— a mirage of eyes, a wayward fen, whirring.

it’s like catching a dog wink. no, it doesn’t really matter who you are.

your toiled, scratchy voice will be my soothsayer.

lean into the gramophone, my eerie song melts into paisley wallpaper stirred and smeared into ghostly wisps.

I will dismantle a taciturn satellite, bleed my green life onto a shard — you can keep me in your darkened room brimming with receipts and VHS covers. waves drawn with a crayon.

1 can tell you dislocated bedtime stories and stand quietly next to you in public. 64

whale

Spectral light: every wail of your fists on yolk-streaked sky— would you listen, if I breathed into Herculean musings or painted a wall with looming shadow?

I’ll go back, back to the dollhouse where my mother feeds me apples

back to an age crisscrossed with train track ribs— a harpooned whale’s bones.

should you find yourself here I would tell you where the black sea meets a single beam of light in a brush stroke of hourlessness— where one askew tooth grins through a dream. the sun appears completely still from every angle, but is actually exploding constantly.

a strawberry glow is the norm, makes green circles in your vision—

here. you find the spark of yourself or that thing we say makes up a strong constitution. 65

sepia

sepia cast dime-store light— smash every light box, every cerebral web.

the switches get stuck. traced by mist, a mass of cloud— the thunderhead is one horizon-long island.

I am trying to maneuver a cypress painting in a waiting room, it’s off-kilter/ framed above years old tabloids- nitrous-induced formations and shadowy branches, a mauve lip wrinkled. everyone just has a toothache. a silver bullet won’t stop the pin points, the brain shutting down its sequences. the cinematic fade-out: walking with bespectacled ancestors down floodlight tunnels— the actress opens her eyes. 66

tidal wave

tattooed, a moon wrappea in twine— its powdered face obscures, obeys—

furlong: the leafy wilds of forests or eyebrows.

all things mean one thing, really, like how faugue feels like roaring clouds.

as I walk, somewhere, a stack of blocks topples.

worlds away, animal tracks are pinned to maps.

brazen rivers speak to no onev except maybe a mayfly.

half-hearted leaps in logic:

love speaks to no one.

the river, the dark eye of a midnight clock. 67

edges

wiry twitch— grey the edges of a smudged, perplexed light. to what end does it carry your voice, a sooty torch? solipsistic, the game of an eye— edged moonlight

staring you

down.

updrafts do funny things such as how did that toy airplane wind up on my balcony? don’t ask why ask how ask what ask where

How many breaths did you take before walking into a room of unwavering, does sentence finishers does explosive does nothing feel miniscule? the depth of this uprightness: crepuscular cigarettes that light up and populate your Hubble deep space field.

Does this story bore you?

does it dredge the landscape in a flour-white robe, compounding tension in a highball glass— or a globe with falling bone-chips?

what sort of fractal ambivalence keeps you here, what solar rage sends photons through your body, where do those melodrama mix tapes lead?

do they swirl into far-sighted sketches, the ceiling of your room momentarily unfamiliar in a haze of astral dreaming?

I think I lost the world o f it, or the earth just moved an eighth of a millimeter 69

heir

I do not see your breath sent skyward as I throw darkness onto gleaming pavement, spit out the edges of tornadoes 1 swallow. where did you leave those stony breaths? was it halfway up those veiny trellises that project beasts onto your wall in moonlight?

I do not see your gilded hair turn ghastly, nor your fingers curl. now, a titan perception.

you are made of the rains that shroud my street in a twinkling veil:

of the coldness that broods inside a pocket watch— of wiry handwriting, that flits from your fingers at midnight.

I do not heed the silken cylinders of light that plague me through curtainless windows. an uncertain domain

There are scriptures thieved from bulging hearts with the winds and tousled pages—

they speak of a languid fog, smoldering lightening,

a savage and virile godhead.

be brave, for futures are haloed by valorous lights. they cut through the ether, an ardent snarl that curls over waxen moon:

a deep pitch place.

in tiie dusky gaps between clouds, or bouncing infinitely inside a roaring star:

I find these liquid breaths, these seldom recognized hums that sink into footsteps. somehow, I hit the low-hanging arch— and hear the silvery voices that peer into my sleep. 71

I’lt let you know when I get there

Was there a moment when you just knew, or was a sudden ceasing of a tuning fork’s voice?

was there a great mane of darkness; or was it like watching the world slowly snuffed out from the bottom of a nacreous pool?

I think I would hardly notice.

unnamed creatures live in secret blue, if you look inside, are there brass pins and clock wheels— levers and pulleys? all those bloody mechanisms I don’t know what to do with? ache: these black visions, whispered as honey. light breathes in these shady dormitories: my hands are two gargoyles awaiting centuries to glide by—

I’ll let you know when I get there. 72

another dream

disappeared into ivy, stone eyes and heather— the weathered hearts of rodents piercing the ever-moving night: a canopy.

a dusky turntable, the weight of arms: two ermines wrapped around my person a warmth— like exactly seventeen inches from a range top burner, like sun gloves, like being. like standing on your porch pretending the rain is doing your bidding. downpour. sprinkle.

sideways spit.

I don’t hear what you whisper— but it calls me back to edges. you can never know the intricacies of a mind:

a snail’s trail glistening on tarmac, something coming loose on wind’s-edge and sung through drainpipes.

strange, when you think of time.